456 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



fications that you can be said to have furnished returns of this 

 crop of wheat. There is not one of them, which a thorough- 

 bred scientific manipulator, if the case were transferred to the 

 laboratory, would not despise himself for leaving out. 



The same necessity for thoroughness exists in all other 

 branches of the business. When you take up a lump of pre- 

 mium butter, you have hold of what seems to be a very simple, 

 home-made fact, and a very pleasant one. But this fact has an 

 antecedent biography, — and before the oily cake has slipped 

 through your fingers, or elsewhere, if you are a good farmer, 

 and a good Yankee, you have at least a dozen questions to ask 

 about it, — how the fact has come to be, — all the way from the 

 cow and the cow's mother, and grandparents, on to the toast. 

 You want a written natural history of this lump, ah ovo usque 

 ad malum. 



Nor is farming singular, in this respect, among the sciences. 

 Look at the nicety of astronomical calculations. Look at the 

 minute mixtures of the chemist. Look at the hair-balances, 

 and tests of exquisite delicacy, in every philosophical apparatus. 

 Observe the most awful precision exacted in clinical surgery. 

 Furnish a Herschell's discoveries without the acliromatic lens 

 and infallible mountings of his telescope and siderial clock, 

 with the horizontal and vertical adjustments of transit instru- 

 ments, air-bubble and spider-lines ; conceive of a Bergman's or 

 Faraday's analyses, without atomic weights and unimpeachable 

 tables and mathematical proportions, and you may expect a 

 perfectly intelligent agriculture without this sharp inspection^ 

 and these unquestionable statistics. Why should you desire 

 exemption from them ? They are what invest your calling with 

 its lasting interest, — its intellectual charm. They furnish the 

 sort of fascination that is likely to pique and attract the curi- 

 osity of bright young men. I can even imagine a man's having 

 his sleep broken, his pulse accelerated, and his nerves in tension, 

 while he watches for the impending result of one of these elabo- 

 rate and exciting experiments, like the issue of some well- 

 matched game. 



I have spoken of the need of these tentative processes. I 

 appeal to your own experience. There are few of that more 

 progressive class of farmers that form societies, and arrange 



